Wavve
Turn Audio into Social Videos
We struggled with the same thing many podcasters, radio shows, & musicians do: Promoting audio on social media. We built Wavve to provide audio creators with an easy & effective way to repurpose audio on social.
Wavve has been acquired by Calm Capital (https://calmcapital.com).
Towards the end of last year, we started to realize that the skills needed to take a company from zero to one compared to the skills needed to take it from a one to a ten are not the same. We love creating. But that’s not what Wavve needs right now. It needs seasoned business operators.
When you’re a founder and you’re running a growing, bootstrapped SaaS company, you can feel a lot of risk when your company equity is the majority of your net worth. A lot of bootstrapped founders don’t talk about this much. But as we started families and got older, we all wanted to take some risk off the table.
After examining the situation from different angles (and knowing that we weren’t interested in a sabbatical), we knew that selling the business was the most attractive path. But deciding that we were ready to sell led us to a whole new set of challenges.
Check out this blog post that details out why we sold, how we did it, and why we went with Calm Capital: https://churnkey.co/blog/wavve-has-been-acquired-by-calm-capital
We hit another huge milestone this morning - $125,000 MRR / $1,500,000 ARR. We use the Baremetrics goal tracker and it always feels amazing when that progress bar hits 100%. We only have two major revenue goals left, so I think we're going to need to set some new goals!
Exactly 5 months after crossing the $1M mark, we've managed to add another $500,000 to ARR. Our main video service continues to post strong growth and revenue from our wavve.link offering has started contributing to revenue as well.
We've been pretty obsessed with customer retention for a while now, and after years of testing and optimizing our churn-fighting approach, it's really starting to pay off. There's no way we'd be where we are today if we hadn't taken steps to decrease churn by as much as we have.
Wavve's growth continues to exceed my expectations. Sometimes it's hard to believe that our little bootstrapped software business has grown into something so large.
Next stop, $2 Million ARR.
Yesterday we crossed over the mythical $83,333 MRR threshold that we'd long dreamed about.
When we set the goal of hitting $1M ARR, it seemed incredibly audacious. There was a very low chance we'd actually hit it. I had a few different financial projections, and none of those figures would get us there. At the time, our churn and growth numbers had us plateauing at a much lower threshold.
Some things that helped get us here:
(1) Running a broader range of growth experiments
(2) Revisiting pricing plans regularly
(3) Reducing churn by letting users pause their plans
(4) Some luck - podcasting has continued to grow as an industry and we've been very fortunate to have a growing TAM
This is by far our most in-depth write up about our story at @wavve. In this written interview w/ Starter Story, we go through the failed startup that preceded Wavve and really dig into the early days of launching and getting those first 10-100 customers.
Re-living the early days turned out to be a pretty therapeutic experience. Three years feels like forever ago. We dug out some early product screenshots & videos which were fun to revisit as well. Give it a read 👇
(started working on this post when we were at 71k MRR but posting with today's date)
Last January we were doing $28k/mo, and in just 12 months we've more than doubled. Here's what seemed to help:
- Increased prices for our top tier plans
- Added subscription "pause"
- Launched wavve.link, a complimentary product
- Redesigned our editor and web app
- Introduced $60/mo Pro plan
- Continued investing in content marketing
We continue to run Wavve as a lean business and have still never taken external funding. I think this was the first year where we were able to hire help for many of our ongoing support and marketing needs. This has been huge for freeing us up to travel, spend more time with our families, and to focus on big picture business goals.
This was the first year where we set clear monthly revenue goals, and this made a big difference for me. During the multi-year grind of building a SaaS company, it's easy to grow numb to the slow, gradual revenue climb. Clear goals make it easier to track progress, align the team, and remind you to celebrate each victory.
We doubled our revenue in 6 months!
The new video infrastructure was a big part of this. Customer videos are now ready in as little as 30 seconds. Previously, it could take 3-5 minutes. We also started getting more paid user conversions by offering free users more time to try our service.
Our old duct-taped backend got us to over 1,000 customers before we hit scaling issues: servers started running out of memory, the job queue would get backed up, and customers were waiting longer and longer for videos to finish. This was something we put off for as long as we could.
We spent two months rewriting our entire backend and now we're really starting to see the benefits. Our AWS bill decreased by more than 50%, video wait times dropped by several minutes, and the system is much more robust with increased logging visibility and retry logic.
Almost a year later - We hit 10k MRR. Slow & steady wins the bootstrapped race
It took 6 months to hit 1k MRR. 6 MONTHS!! There were times that I wanted to quit but each month showed a little bit of growth.